Saturday October 23 was one of the best days of my life! It also was an extreme emotional roller coaster. To preface, I will take us back to a few weeks ago.
Singing is hard work! You have to focus on sooo many different things at once and the thought of being judged on it is terrifying. I was placed into a quartet for All State auditions in early September. Our directors kept switching us around until the beginning of October when the audition-ers were finalized. People thought that the quartets were finalized too. We were wrong. The day before we had "mock auditions" for All State at Washington High School, our directors decided to switch our quartets around. They told us that they accidentally messed up when they selected us before. This made so many people angry because we didn’t have time to get used to our group before we had to be critiqued. Instead of giving us really nit-picky and constructive advice, we were going to get general things because we had to start from scratch. All of the work we did with our former quartets went down the drain.
Once we started to get comfortable with our groups, things started turning around. We were working with a director or on our own during every choir class. It actually got pretty annoying. All we did everyday was sing the All State music over and over. On the up side, our quartets improved a lot because of this. I also became good friends with my quartet members, which I enjoyed a lot because I had THE YUMMIEST bass! Really, all I wanted to do was stand and stare at him during the practices. I even got his number and found out that he’s a super nice guy and is really friendly and funny in addition to his major hotness!! (He’s my future husband!! Shhhhhh don’t tellJ). So anyway, I, my bass, and my alto were feeling pretty good about our audition. We were confident enough that we wouldn’t humiliate ourselves in the audition. Our tenor was a different story.
What I’m about to say is meant in the nicest way possible. The tenor we had is a really nice guy and all, but he just wasn’t getting it. He was very quiet and even stopped singing in some places because he didn’t know his part. Our choir teacher told us at the start that if someone wasn’t getting the music, they wouldn’t be allowed to audition. This caused much confusion with the rest of my quartet because it was less than a week before the auditions, our tenor was struggling and fit the description our teacher set for those who would not audition, and yet he hadn’t been cut yet. I even talked to my teacher 3 days before the audition to figure out what the heck was going on. He said that he knew that our tenor wasn’t ready but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to cut him because he didn’t want to crush his spirit. Plus, apparently you could barely hear him while the rest of us were singing so my teacher told me that he didn’t think that our tenor’s singing would affect our audition. I was ok with this, except that our group practiced without him before, and we got a lot more done without him. When he was there, we always had to wait for him to get his music organized, he made excuses a lot, and we ALWAYS had to plunk out his parts on the piano. Without him, we were able to focus on the musicality of our singing and only had minor pitch problems compared to his major mess-ups.
Finally, two days before the audition, our choir teacher listened to our quartet practice and decided to “pull the plug” (his words). It wasn’t a very big deal to our tenor because he was a sophomore so he had two more years ahead of him, the teacher actually talked to him the day before about maybe being cut, and he also had a sinus infection or something so he wasn’t “singing his best” anyway, according to him. After he left, my trio and I worked very hard for the next two days to adjust to having one less person. It wasn’t a very big change, but we still had to adjust.
I’m very thankful to my group because we all took the process seriously and worked super hard. I had so much fun with them and couldn’t have asked for a better trio. (763 words)
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